恢复使用git clean -df删除的文件

Question

I was trying to clear my git after adding files from the wrong directory and ran the git clean -df function. This resulted in all my user data being deleted.

I haven't done anything more in git after this, and I don't dare to turn of my PC at the moment. However, I noticed that there is a .git folder which contains about 600MB of data. Is it possible that y files are stored there and can be recovered?

I run Windows 10 and do not have any backup or restore points for the user data folder.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I had som really important data stored. Thank you

Answer 1

There's no way to recover from this unless you had a backup or want to explore using undelete utilities. Git is not saving backups anywhere.

Answer 2

Short answer and most probable there is not!!

Still some IDE's track and store locally this information see for example: Is it still possible to restore deleted untracked files in git?

So depending on your IDE or text editor it still might be possible.

Answer 3

If you're using Eclipse, and you're only missing code or text, don't despair, not all may be lost. Go to:

[WORKSPACE]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.history

Then use grep (*nix), FINDSTR (Windows) or a similiar tool to search for text snippets you know to have occurred in the deleted files. Eclipse keeps a lot of local history revisions around, so if you worked on these files recently, you will probably have a lot of matches. Then you need to find most recent one of these, which can be a bit tricky.

To give an example: After doing a quick git clean -d -fx to show this dangerous feature to a colleague, I was missing an untracked java code file, of which I knew it contained the String XrefCollector . I was able to find the last local history revision by doing this:

find . -printf "%T@ %p\n" | sort -n | cut -d" " -f2 | xargs grep -l XrefCollector | tail -n1

Here, find prepends the date (epoch) to the files, sort sorts (numerically), cut removes the date again, and xargs passes the filenames on to grep , which searches for the desired string. Finally, tail only shows the last line of output.